Key Content Is King

Many creative webmasters and graphics designers build fantastic "visually appealing sites" to capture the attention of their internet browser audience. But, these sites quite often have one major flaw. Aside from putting in your meta tags and adding targeted keywords, building a search engine friendly website requires "Content" above all else!

Small business owners who decide to run their own eCommerce online store often publish their website with lots of products and images hoping they'll be a success overnight. The reality of it is -- it is an ongoing and continual development process that gets your online business growing! Search engines look for: relative "textual" content on the web pages, and related external links leading to your content from other websites.

The relative text content on the site is still the highest key factor on how search engines will rank you. After all, when someone searches for widgets, they want to find widgets!

Be careful you don't over-do how much text content you put on any given page...that can hurt you on search engines.  Ideally, you want to have a minimum of 120 words, with a maximum of 1,000 - 1,500 words on each page for the best exposure. You can always break up the page with images and paragraphs or headings to allow your readers an eye break while reading.  Images are content too - remember to name your "image files" with descriptive words and alt. tags to maximize your search engine exposure. Far too often we see sites that have named their source images files like this: "image001.jpg" which is a mistake. Naming your images with descriptive tagging allows for search engines to recognize the image for what it is!

Here's a good example of how to name your image files, obviously if an image was placed here, you would see: "book_about_ecommerce.jpg". Naming your images using the "_" underscore allows the actual broken words to be recognized by search engine robots as relative text (never use spaces on web file names). Also, when you mouse over an image (like the one at the top right of this newsletter), you'll see the alt. tag or screen tip pop-up describing the image. You will want to have the alt. tag similar to the file name, but not exactly the same to get the best results.

Search engines also pay attention to important tags like bolding and italics. Though keep this type of tagging to a minimum on your web pages (once or twice for important phrases is enough). Too much bolding and italics can distract your reader and the search engines regard excess as spam or keyword stuffing. You'll notice on this newsletter this particular tactic was used at the very top above (white text on grey) and in the header to avoid distracting the reader. You can underline for SE exposure, though it can lead the readers to think it's a link, so it is best to avoid it.

Other ways of growing your traffic to your eCommerce website is to build pages specifically designed to lead someone into your site with "other" related content. This is usually additional supporting content relative to what you're selling on your website. Articles, "Great Idea's" and "How To" pages, press releases, and instructional pages not only bump up your SE related content, but add to bring your customers back for other things!

An excellent use of this practice can be found on www.beadproducts.com
Not only does this site offer beading and jewelry products -- to help their customers they have provided "related" useful content on jewelry products. If you dig deeper into their website, they provide tips and training information and manufacturer information for their products. All this information will only help to serve in moving them up in the search engines.

 Issue 1 - November 2006

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Important Website T.I.P.S.

Submit your site to search engines

Submit your site to small business directories

Include a links page on your website

Add your website URL to all your printed promotional material

If you can, incorporate your URL into your logo or company name on printed material

Don't just rely on emarketing, promote your website offline as well

Encourage contact through your website through the use of contact forms and provide a link to those forms that's easily accessible

Target, Target, Target - the meta tags and keywords on each and every page...don't waste a single page

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